The Indian tradition of Holi is celebrated at the Festival of Colors in Norwalk. This festival marks the beginning of spring by throwing colors — here, a mixture of food dyes and cornstarch — into the air.

Reader photos: Best of Southern California moments for March 2013

This month’s photos work in pairs — we start off with Mark Rosales and Dana Barsuhn’s street black-and-white images of passersby. I love the stare the woman is giving Rosales in the first image and the use of the blurred-out postcard rack on the right-hand side of the frame.

For the next pair, Toby Hancock and Stan Paul looked up at buildings — for Hancock, it was Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, and for Paul, it was an unusual building facade through an early morning haze. A single light in a window adds an air of mystery to the image.

The third pair is Michael Ares’ photo of a bicyclist on the Greenway Trail in Whittier, and Amparo Rios’ gorgeous shot of a basketball frozen mid-air, at the peak of its arc. I wonder if the shot went in.

The last image in our set doesn’t fit with any of the pairs, but the image from the Festival of Colors in Norwalk celebrating the Indian tradition of Holi, which marks the beginning of spring, makes it a great image to end with.

I asked Rios about her basketball image, and she told me that unfortunately, it was a near-miss. You can see the shot fall short in another image here.